SALIENT SEED EXTRACTION BASED TARGET DETECTION IN SAR IMAGES

A salient seed extraction based target detection method is proposed in this paper, aiming to distinguish target points from background points in SAR images. Different from recent superpixel based method which generates super-pixels firstly, and for each superpixel decides whether it belongs to part of a target. The proposed method employs a salient point to region scheme. At first, salient seeds are extracted by mean-shift and region feature based approach. Then, pixels are assigned to the most similar seed and those assigned to the salient seeds are extracted to form the foreground region. Finally, constant false alarm rate (CFAR) operation is employed to detect the target points from the foreground region. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by comparing with five state-of-the-art methods on TerraSAR-X images.